“Many Saudi nationals have carried out terrorist operations in Iraq, and every Iraqi citizen has a right to believe that Saudi Arabia is a supporter of terrorism,” he told Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television channel.
On March 8, Fox News cited a senior Iraqi counterterrorism intelligence officer as saying that around 30 percent of the Daesh terrorists in Iraq had been Saudi nationals, who had entered the country over the previous three years via Turkey or through the Syrian border town of Abu Kamal.
Elsewhere in the interview, Abadi said it was too early to think that relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia had warmed. The normalization of the ties, he said, was only in its embryonic stages.
Saudi Arabia’s official radical ideology of Wahhabism, which is known for its lack of tolerance, informs the mindset of Daesh and other terrorist groups worldwide. Daesh has been ravaging Iraq, and neighboring Syria, since 2014.
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